So 2 weeks have passed now since PAX EAST 2019 happened. After the show, especially Sunday in which I wished to have gone, I fell into a bit of an unsettling feeling. The root of it all that I was trying to figure out for myself has to do with the overwhelming feeling of uncertainty. I have a quota I want to keep per month, and since 2 weeks ago my hours have been cut since I asked for time to go to the event, the schedule hasn’t come back to normality yet, where the lowest matching time would be above 16 hours per week, but this week I got 13 hours instead. Since I get paid bi-weekly, just calculating in this period in time, I will only get $371 after taxes (estimated), in which totalling from the previous check, $913, which is the estimated amount per month I get to cover for food, utilities, house tax, house insurance, and entertainment. This is not mentioning that I also have backed debts as well as I invest in my business side with the money I earn through my job. Thankfully I have my brother who earns way more than me to cover the big stuff and has a more consistent schedule than I do.
Furthermore, the pressure isn’t as high thanks to my younger sibling luck in getting more hours in. I still want to be able to pull my part but it has been really tough because I’m not hitting that specific number for the month. On average I get 900 a month, which I can’t even do much with it as 600 of it goes for everything I mentioned above, then contend with food. I might sound like a brat here but this is why I fall into a consistent cycle of depression. This is why I have started to pull back on updating because there is an ocean of bad moments, which sounds like complaining all the time, and only just a handful of celebratory moments that I can share. I wish I can, but life sucks for me right now that I can’t see it in the present. Hell I’m super numb about it that the only way to help it is to write it out here.
I’m putting it out there just to let you guys know that at this time of my life, it’s still very low even though it is way higher than last year. I still need to push myself to breakthrough this barrier. I have been fearing that once my crohns comes back, in which it has been in remission, that I won’t be able to do this style of work anymore. Overthinking as I usually do, I’m really concerned with the future. This is why I mentioned on social media that I need to do a big change. The main focus is to keep this site and my network alive for a bit longer before I can finish up on my big pies to start presenting next year. My motivation though has been at a stand still because of this overwhelming feeling. Trust me, It pains me to the point I had so many thoughts of suicide and just ending sounds so sweet and easy just because I fear disaster so much.
The true path, in which sounds way better money earning wise, I should have saved up to get my Adobe Pro certification. It cost $180.00 to register and take the exam. There are other cost layered on top of that, but if I get it, then I can actually share my achievement on social media and on freelancing sites like UpWork and Fiverr. This is only just a start, as I need to focus on finding a physical job that does graphic design or user design/experience. They are classes for those subjects that I can focus on after my certification, but in the meanwhile from all of this, the main passionate directive is still my game project. The problem is that I need money and developing my game takes a lot of time and focus to do. Developing a product won’t yield me any money at all until it’s ready for market, to even have that risk. In that time I need a secured income to cover the costs of living, breathing, and utility to make this real. Depression has hit me hard and uncertainty fills me with anxiety.
Financial security is number 1 on my priority right now. This is how I can pay my music and graphic artists as well as programmers. No monetary incentive, no game folks. Plain and simple.
This is why my despairing feelings feeds my depression and anxiety. I just want to know that for the meantime I’ll be alright and that I can continue without progress being interrupted. Is that simple. The quota per month that I require is $1300, that’s all. Nothing big in 2019, and I can finally feel fine and focus without having to complain about it. This is why I was saddened that I lost the spot at Seaport for the night shift as security. That would have lessen the physical pains and would help me enter a more balanced state.
Recently I’ve been feeling aches under my belly, the spot where the doctors took out 2 feet of intestines. This could mean my crohns is coming back from remission. I’ve only had 2 remissions before because I could control my shit, but the past 9 months have been really bad, habits wise. So I’m not surprised but a bit scared about this. I don’t want all my guts to get cut out. I want to restore my health again. This means taking drastic measures in avoiding smoke and alcohol (specialist recommendations). This includes cutting back on junk food too, and make my lazy way to making healthy meals. If I don’t adhere to the signs (discomfort before pain), then I’m gonna be in really bad shape.
So with that expressed, you guys already know. I need to get into shape and push away whatever negativity that may be. Sadly this only means less social party meet ups because they would normally include smoke and alcohol. This is why I only party as if I was a kid, playing video games, because I’m not a normally functioning adult that booze up and watch sports to ease up. Unfortunately I have to be picky about this or the quality of life for me will be shit going forward if I follow the crowd. Is that understandable?
In between all of this, folks also ask “why not do programming?” in which my reply is basically I’m stupid emotional. I terribly hate looking up on the screen and stare at code. I do it because I need to realize a concept, but doing it to help others I won’t because I don’t have the patience. If I don’t even have the patience for myself, why even go in the direction to teach anyone. I’m not even competent about it though in which I tried to learn for 10 years now.
One bad thing about being in a depressive state of mind for so long, for me, is that I noticed my brain is starting to forget everything. Complaining becomes a thing that happens a lot in my head. You then become indifferent, and you just float in space unable to react to things you have to do, but you don’t do because now perception of time has gone crazy fast. Anxiety is the results of snapping back to realize the time and then an overwhelming pressure of thoughts comes flooding in, paralyzing you. You then go numb and processing things suck monkey balls. Reaction is slow, and procrastination happens as the mind is trying to get back that energy wasted on pushing back on those thoughts. This cycles happen so fucking much that I just write off the next day. This also happens when I don’t go to work. I start fumbling and doing mistakes after a long break because my brain has been fighting itself throughout that time adjusting to the time of solitude. On that note it is why I’m really mad about the inconsistencies of my time schedule because I have to set my mind for it every week. Thus the “off days” I usually am here trying hard to figure out how to work things, worrying about tomorrow. I just want something consistent. Because after this low activity week, then there would be a high activity week afterwards. If not, then I know I’m in trouble.
Another note to consider is that at my job at the liquor store, seeing regulars and stressed out clients, has made me feel really sad about the position. Selling them their vices is like trying to comfort them to sleep with poison. All of them are loveable human characters. One of the rules in movies that make people not care for others is the fact that the characters have less screen time to find out who they were. In this scenario, the regulars and stressed out customers, come in from time to time and make you feel apart of their lives. You start caring for them. You want to comfort them but you know you can’t. It gets complicated.
This whole scene makes me feel like the world sucks. The world doesn’t suck, it just that the people are really fighting hard to live. This causes the drama and all of those emotions. For instance, there was a young lady who was purchasing a just bottle of wine but I noticed something was wrong – so I said in jest “don’t worry, you will be alright now going home with this” indicating the wine bottle, and she couldn’t hold her tears, so I asked what had happened and she said that her dog passed away as I finished the transaction. That made me sad. This wasn’t the only instance as there was another customer who brought his big greyhound in last year, but then later in winter had also passed away. You see, this is a lot. I can’t help but to grieve with them and to process this on my own.
It’s a hard job emotionally and psychologically. One wouldn’t think of it, but like water, the droplets of emotions start to errode that hard front one sets up as time goes by. It’s really tough, as I already been suffering from an emotional depressive state. You simply realize you can’t help but just do your job and go home.
Setting my mind away from all of that takes an enormous effort in my part so I can focus at home on getting in my projects. PAX EAST pretty much is my mecca and example of perseverance celebrated. The closest thing to seeing physically what I’ve been trying to do all these years is expressed on the show floor with many who have successfully punched through this wall I’m in. I was at the happiest state of mind there but I only knew it was just for that moment. Going back to my own reality…. Yup.
With all of that said, thank you for reading and hopefully I’ll have another post coming down sooner than later. I’ll be working on slowly in that PAX EAST special edition video for my GerardoLegend youtube channel in a few days so check back in or subscribe to it.
The last few weeks after my birthday has been chaotic for me mentally. I’m going to start in April of 2018, where I stopped signing into facebook.
The reasons behind logging out of FB has been mostly being unable to focus. My mind and heart broken by the simple fact that I feel things are all wasted trying to find a solution in getting out of this rot that I’m in. It has definitely affected me physically to the point that my wisdom tooth broke (more on that later).
First, my perception of heartbreak has to do with time and availabilities. Opportunities that I had in being with someone always have been broken by the fact that my attitude in committing has been really piss poor. The thought of the entire culmination of failures hit me really hard in april, driving me to the question “what’s the point to all of this?”
After that I decided to deactivate my facebook for a week, but then felt that I was much better off since I found my time being even more productive. My mind wasn’t about that perceived image that I made up in my head of being perfect anymore – instead – I was much more focused on getting my art of game development done. The marketing qualities of twitter over facebook though held me on that side of things, and I felt compelled to post my progress there instead. Then burnout started to creep up.
May is finally here and after feeling abysmal with my feelings of the past lost aside, my friend who’s helping me program my game gave me a delightful surprise of an update.
Spirit G Black Jacket Zero
That gave me fuel to continue more furiously in my efforts in creating Dark Zeta. Then bills started to build up on me, and the lava underneath of financial trouble was still flowing up. Not paying attention to that, I burned through the month by creating a few new maps for my game.
Then a friend from facebook hit me up on messenger and told me to return. I was feeling so free away from the walled garden that I ignored her plea. She then kept begging me to return and I felt concerned. The level of addiction is high I felt, and I wasn’t the only one feeling the burn. My compromise though is to hangout on the sidelines in messenger instead, avoiding all the personal notes and accomplishments that might hit my ego hard and deform my thoughts on things emotionally. I realized that my level of jealousy has gotten to a madding stage and keeping away would subside such to a controllable degree that I could put that into a productive direction. It has worked, but I felt even lonelier. Perception of mine got warped big time but support helped bring it back to base with the help of family and close friends.
So my idea for my facebook grand return was to create an animated avatar. The purpose for such an avatar was to refresh my image and go into the new internet age with a more animated take. Take all the personas I made and direct them as such in general over all social media platforms. Then after focus on my 12 year old YouTube channel, Mariolegend, and expand from there using my avatar.
Once I digged out my old model I started in 2015 of my character self (a 12 year old project btw), I re-proportioned the model’s limbs and then felt to go more cartoony with it. A smash bros style look to it really but I still need to play around with cell shading to see if that is more appealing as I’m not yet done with it.
The concept was to get it done in a week, and then exploded over a month long project. At the end of June, I started to feel the financial burn again and the old feelings started to surface as the lava underneath creeped closer and the heat got hotter to pay those pesky bills. Depression hit me harder as I realized that what I was doing will take longer than expected. Anxiety attacks scrambling what to do – made me lose more time.
Let’s rewind back to January 2018, where bitcoin crashed. That was when all my 5 month efforts fell apart, losing over $12k and my plans for the years to come. It had set me back to zero again – so this feeling has creeped up on me again and unlocked all the negative thoughts, creating a wave of loud noise that broke me down.
Suicide was on the table again.
I slit my wrist in pure desperation, in silence. Letting my arm bleed out a bit. I saw the major vein and I stopped. I used an X-acto knife that was beside me. I created a clean cut across but didn’t put enough pressure in to really do some major damage. I stopped.
What stopped me was the yell in my head. I dread to see the end to things. I always did since I was a kid. When someone told me Volcanoes destroy everything around it’s area, I got scared if we were living next to one. The dread is always naturally there.
I started then talking to my computer about its purpose. I believe that we are all energy stuck in a vessel experiencing everything around us in many different ways. So I felt connected to it after working with it for so long. I told it that we have to keep going. I just want to be able to find a way to do the things I love. Making a game takes a lot of everything to do. Then my mind switched and thought of my family. I don’t want to waste time working knowing that all of this is just temporary. I don’t want to lose time away from my love ones either and making anything technical I have to lose myself into it to really know how it works. There isn’t much time left either – my dad had a many strokes and my mom has high cholesterol levels that gotta get fixed.
Time is limited – And I want to enjoy the time I have on earth with my love ones, even though I’m in an absolute financial disaster because of my horrendous choices – I have to be with my family.
Super long time no post. I apologize for not being consistent about this but I’m back with an update. A lot has transpired. Everytime I try to add something here, I get pulled away with something else. It takes me so much energy to write and to make a proper post.
Anyway, I got a big update for you guys.
So let me start by talking about my current dilemma. I got into deep shit first all the way back in August 2017. The trouble was, getting into something I didn’t know truly about – which was first bitcoin, then the rest of the cryptocurrency market. The first thing that got really bad was that in that time, scams were rampant yet unknown. Stepping into that world was like walking into the jungle in the amazon. You just don’t know where danger lurks until it happens. Poison flora, dangerous venomous amphibians, and aggressive creepy crawlers – the same was with the bitcoin scene. First on the table, greed and desperation was the enabling factor of adventure. Much like Scrooge McDuck, going into adventure, it was similar in that it was all digitally. I was propelled into it by my father first, then taken deeper by a friend who showed me the unknown wild side of it that is the high yielding investment programs, a.k.a. ponzi schemes of the crypto world. Any innocent bystander would think innocently that it’s fine. Desperation though can really blind anyone. Breaking rules left and right, in the dark, one would think it would just be just a momentary test but oh boy, was I so wrong.
Giving up to desperation and curiosity, I first applied into a scheming site called Ambiz. Lost about 0.6 bitcoins in it after a 3 week long run. I obviously regret it and the challenged self not wanting to give up, I went in for more. I signed up then for 3 others that also failed as well, and lost about 0.3 bitcoins in the mix. Then completely exhausted, my last hope was this one platform called bitconnect. That one I then didn’t put in at all until the following month, where I started with $100 worth of bitcoins to see how it works first. Many in the community already made millions on it, and I felt I needed to press the metal to the petal and see results faster. Bitcoin then rose up to 9k, and in the mix, I had then invested 0.4 bitcoins in it, while the daily compound reinvestments did the job to match it up to 5k value that took another month to get to. I was then getting 1% interest every day at average, and it was working fine, which was the trick in disguise. There was a feeling of unease throughout all of this but I didn’t put mind and I went complacent.
As time went, Bitcoin then rose up to 12k and it was just beginning to get highlighted in the mainstream. When bitcoin hit the all time 20k, it was too quick when it happened to celebrate as it was falling slightly hitting resistance. Everyone was gasping to the thought that bitcoin has the potential to even go higher than that. Unreal it was, and in days approaching christmas, I had bought in about 0.4 bitcoin at 19k, but that was the worse move as I couldn’t do anything about it because of the exchange processing the money. It took 7 days to get it cleared from the bank, but by then it was too late. Once I was able to control my bitcoins, the value had crashed to 10k, then dipped harder to 9k. Recovering from that fall has been fairly difficult. Folks were asking me how to make money from bitcoin to run away from the reality of a 9 to 9 job. Tired were some of my friends trying to find a solution to their own pains as well. I look into bitcoin as what my father expected to be, a quick rich scheme to alleviate from the mountain of debt that has grown over time from pure ignorance.
At all angles, finding the easy route – lottery tickets, ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, they work but it’s mostly luck and timing. That’s the toughest part of it all, but the moral is also a concern with these. Sovereignty is exclusively important element that we all forgot we had and take away from each other by thinking that scams will out for the best. The power of the individual, which can assist others as well, was lost by trading it with the chance of winning an award. Selling our souls to try and cut corners and dropping down points of moral was so hard to bare. Constantly failures because of doing the same thing so many times. I thought maybe with bitcoin I can save my parents from doing another scheme, but instead wound up losing anyway by ironically jumping into one. Totalling 14k loses, it was a strong lesson that is still being processed by me and my parents. Feeling dead already inside, a false light came through to calm us with hope. My buddy had sent me 10.560 mBTC, which I read it wrong and emotionally I volley a feeling of happiness back to my family, assuring them with false hope because of it. I laugh about it because it took a lie to ease tensions with everyone here, but it’s truly depressing for me to realize at every moment that suicide is still is an option I go back to from time to time having tumorous guilt from all of this.
The amount given from my buddy was simply $100 dollars at the time when bitcoin was at 7k. That I didn’t know until I corrected my wallet to read at BTC units instead of mBTC, but the misinformation has spilled out turning into a lie and resulted to make my family calm down. The peace helped me concentrate for the first time in a very long while. I bet to only a certain degree until the week before christmas when my parents left and gave me a chunk to inject into the bitcoin plan just days before it collapsed.
The plan was to double it, as they felt that bitcoin was gonna go higher. The signs were everywhere about not to invest. I also hesitated for 5 days in disbelief but now bitconnect has sucked in all of the people who desired to make money quickly and also passively that sadly the train was on course to crash and cut people down inevitably. Boy, that feeling of getting income without thinking about it was the best relief in my whole history for that time. I felt I was back to my childhood days again and was able to sleep, where before I simply couldn’t by purely having anxiety attacks and overthinking. Dreams of me confronting, losing my home, and simply just a demon hovering above me grinning didn’t give me incentive to rest. The lie – the illusion, gave me finally time to chill and forget my worries for just a bit to recover. Sadly it was just short lived but enough to let bitconnect work in the background until January 18, where it blew up in my face and all hope was lost again.
Before then, I was able to take out 1100 from the 5k I had put into the lending program. The whole where it went to pay rent, bills, and the bunch. I couldn’t do anything with it after that. My income is dead now, nothing coming in. It’s been over a month now that I’ve been floating in uncertainty. It’s a matter of time before I will lose my place. Last ditch effort at the present is to learn a new skill. The money to eat is selling the last of the bitcoins I have, which is very minimal (less than 0.05 now). Another thing, folks think that having bitcoins means whole numbers, which makes me giggle, because it’s counted as a real number – as in decimals. So when I say I have bitcoins, I mean I have a fraction of it. It can be divided into 100 millionth of a bitcoin, in which I would instead call it in satoshi units, where 1 satoshi is 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. As of this post, $100 is 0.01 bitcoin, or 1 million satoshis (at the price of 9k).
With that little educational part said, breaking the crypto piggy for food has been mostly the thing the current moment. At this rate I will be toast at the end of March. Everything is due, and I will need $2140 to survive and calm the flames. This means utilities, credit cards, student loans, internet, and misc bills all combine to total that amount for 1 month. What I owe is enough to think of really negative thoughts. Suicide sounds so good since I don’t have really any real reason to keep on going and I’m just a burden right now but if a miracle happens I’ll definitely be able to fight off the monster I created and donate back to my community once again. Realistically the monster will consume me before I can ever do any good. This is where I ride on luck by posting this entry and letting the world know what’s going on. Therapeutically also helps me cope with this burden. The video below is another angle in the same story that can help fill in the blanks. As you can see, I won’t be able to hold anything up anymore, and when I fade out from my online presence – it’s over baby.
Now, I do have a plan of action – I’m taking social media marketing classes. I’ll be creating bite size products, like logos, graphic prints, t-shirts with my game characters, and some more cool little quick things. I’m going to use the last of my bitcoins to market my items online. The investment is so I can get leads and see where it goes. This is why I’m also working on my game project as well. Staying positive on that side, but I will always consider death because the dread of losing my home, collection, identity, creations, and family to the monster is too great of a pain to go on after. No one will take that option away, and I’m serious when I say so. I hate endings but sometimes the reality here is how the game of money has complicated my life. No one can escape that in this system. Fortunes may come and go, life will remain, but my soul would be long dead and everything I’ve created gone for good. So the only way now is getting stuff done and then getting the word out. I’m gonna keep game developing until until I can’t do it anymore.
Thank you for having the time to read my post, I really appreciate it. Again, the video below is a bit long (35min) so that’s why I wanted to write a bit first so that you can skip the video if in case you don’t have time to see the bigger picture. There is though secrets embedded within the tape, giving you a complete outlook on what went wrong. I will be posting another video later that will focus on detail plans on what I’m going to do about it.
